i have a venta lw45. same principle, but instead of a wick, it has these rotating disks that the water sticks to (with a little soap in the water). Works incredibly well, still uses next to no energy (<8W) and the disks are super easy to clean. It’s a beast, goes through 9 liters of water in a bit over a day. All the parts are easily accessible for maintenance and there’s replacement parts if anything ever were to break (though i havent needed those yet).

the disks are especially nice when you have hard water, the calcium can be a pain to remove from a wick, but you can put the venta plastic disks (and lower housing, if you can fit it) in the dishwasher to get them good as new. And calcium does not stick to them weld, so a quick rinse under a strong showerhead is usually enough to clean the disks. Definitely one of the best appliance purchases i ever made.

Kobo.com DRM is also very easy to bypass and turn into epub using knock

The newest generation of xps i shit anyways, good riddance.

i was really happy with my 2019ish xps. But the 2024 one is hot garbage. not just that it arrived with the keyboard not working and Dell taking 3 months to replace it. There’s a total of 2 usb-c ports on it. That’s all the connectors, yes. No, no headphone jack either. And one of those two is taken up with charging, so i’m left with one port if i dont use a dockingstation.

the whole function bar is touch now. you need to hit it 3 times for it to react, who needs Esc anyways. Unless you want to type in the number row, then the function row will pick up random key presses sometimes.

Copilot key no one asked for. Power button is just an unlabelled piece of plastic that looks like filler, not a button. Keyboard sucks in general, too little space between keys, you’re bound to mistype.

linux support is ok, though webcam doesn’t work in firefox, hibernate doesn’t work, every few weeks it’ll just freeze. But otherwise acceptable.

definitely my last dell, i really hate it.

[Edit] Oh and I forgot the best part, when the dell repairman finally repaired it after 3 months, he said “oh a new XPS? Yeah, those suck, every customer hates them especially for software development”

not sure i agree with that. I mean ok, i recently had three interviews for a company where each interviewer asked me almost the same questions. That was clearly a waste.

At my place, we do a 30min introductory call with the boss first, to quickly weed out unfit candidates and not waste employee and interviewee time with interviews. if that’s ok, then there’s three interviews of 45-60 minutes, one with the product owner that focuses on soft skills and team fit, one with the team your applying to and one with the other team (like frontend or backend) with more technical things, and also just if you’d like to work with this person.

no amount of interviewing will ever guarantee that things work out and unfit people can slip through cracks. And i hate wasting time in tons of interviews. But i’d also not want to work at a place where i know my coworkers were hired after just 1 hour quick chatting. That so little time to get an idea of a person, to spot any red flags. Heck, the ‘tell me a bit about yourself’ section of an interview is already 15 minutes and not usually very helpful.

What sucks the most about rust is that 90% of rust jobs are some crypto bullshit. I love the language, but finding normal jobs is near impossible.

At the same time, i could find 20 Go positions but Go just isn’t exciting. It’s the new java imo, working with it probably good for job security, but i just don’t see myself working in Go in the future as a main language.

One question that’d be interesting to know the answer to is where it ends up at. I could imagine microplastics from the garbage island mostly staying around the island, whereas ones from tires will end up all over the environment.

In addition to all the other comments, pumping warm water into natural bodies of water can also be bad for the environment.

i know of one nuclear powerplant that does this and it’s pretty bad for the coral population there.

‘Programming from the ground up’ the main idea of this one is to teach programming in a bottom up way, so very low level.

it’s mostly about teaching (linux) assembly to beginners, so in a way it is just learning a new language. But it’s mainly about understanding low level how a computer works, like registers, kernel calls, how function calls are handled, all for beginners. It’s really easy to pick up.

Knowing those fundamentals can go a long way in understanding other computing concepts.

Others that come to mind are :

• Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
• A Philosophy of Software Design
• Software Architecture: The Hard Parts"

There was a recent paper that argues ‘bullshitting’ is the most apt analogy. I.e. telling something to satisfy the other person without caring about the truth content of what you say

Well, cars are certainly important everywhere in the world and still too important in Switzerland. But relatively speaking compared to other countries they’re really not that important.

Right now there’s a vote coming up to build more highways, it’ll be interesting to see how that turns out.

To put some numbers on things, we spend 4-5 billion per year on rail, we spend 8.8billion over the next 3 years on road maintenance plus total another 11 billion until 2030 for new road infrastructure. I wouldn’t call that ‘barely investing’, it seems roughly equal to me.

Uhm, this came out as part of a law suit against them by the record industry? So they are in the process of being sued.

While not surprising, the admission, which was made as part of court proceedings responding to a massive recording industry lawsuit against the company, shows yet again that many AI tools are trained on, essentially, anything that companies can get their hands on.

It’s not. A single miner often has like 4 GPUs running at 100% load, 24/7 and I doubt someone will build a 100 Megawatt facility with thousands of computers to get fallout tokens.

Though it is the same thing in the sense of running computer to generate worthless digital tokens. The main difference in that sense is that fallout tokens do actually have a use(in game)!